A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

“The PASS ID Act addresses most of the major privacy and security concerns with REAL ID,” said Ari Schwartz, Vice-President of CDT. The release cited four ways that PASS ID was an improvement over the bill it’s modeled on, REAL ID.

Interstate Data Sharing?

First, CDT said, PASS ID “[r]emoves the requirement that states ‘provide electronic access’ allowing every other state to search their motor vehicles records.” It’s technically true: The language from REAL ID directly requiring states to share information among themselves came out of PASS ID. But the requirements of the law will cause that information sharing to happen all the same.

Like REAL ID did, PASS ID would require states to confirm that “a person submitting an application for a driver’s license or identification card is terminating or has terminated any driver’s license or identification card” issued by another state.

How do you do that? You check the driver license databases of every other state. Maybe you do this by directly accessing other states’ databases; maybe you do this indirectly, through a “pointer system” or “hub.” But to confirm that you’re talking about the right person, you don’t just compare names. You compare names, addresses, pictures, and other biometrics.

Just like REAL ID, PASS ID would require states to share driver data on a very large scale. It just doesn’t say so. As with REAL ID, the security weaknesses of any one state’s operations would accrue to the harm of all others.

REAL ID had an open-ended list of “official purposes” - things that the homeland security secretary could require a REAL ID for. PASS ID is not so open-ended, but that is a small impediment to only one form of mission creep.

PASS ID places no limits on how the DHS, other agencies, and states could use the national ID to regulate the population. It simply requires the DHS to use PASS ID for certain purposes. A simple law change or amendment to existing regulation would expand those uses to give the federal government control over access to employment, access to credit cards, voting - CDT’s own PolicyBeta blog called a plan to use REAL ID to control cold medicine a “terrifying” example of mission creep. And these are just the ideas that have already been floated.

Ann Collins, the Registrar of Motor Vehicles from the State of Massachusetts, … said, “If you build it, they will come.” What she meant by that is that if you compile deep data bases of information about every driver, uses for it will be found. The Department of Homeland Security will find uses for it. Every agency that wants to control, manipulate, and affect people’s lives will say, “There is our easiest place to go. That is our path of least resistance.”

PASS ID is the same medium for mission creep that REAL ID is. The problem is with having a national ID at all - not with what its enabling legislation says.

A glaring oversight of REAL ID - and the competition for glaring oversights was fierce - was to omit any requirement for privacy and security of the databases states would maintain and share on behalf of the federal government. The DHS took pains in the REAL ID rulemaking to drain this swamp. It tried to require minimal information collection for identity verification and minimal information display on the card and in the machine readable zone. (It failed in important ways, as I will discuss below.) The REAL ID regulation required states to file security plans that would explain how the state would protect personally identifiable information. And it said it would produce a set of “Privacy and Security Best Practices.” None of this mollified REAL ID opponents, and the privacy bromides in the PASS ID Act won’t either.

One of the more interesting privacy “protections” in the PASS ID Act is a requirement that individuals may access, amend, and correct their own personally identifiable information. This is a new and different security/identity fraud challenge not found in REAL ID, and the states have no idea what they’re getting themselves into if they try to implement such a thing. A May 2000 report from a panel of experts convened by the Federal Trade Commission was bowled over by the complexity of trying to secure information while giving people access to it. Nowhere is that tension more acute than in giving the public access to basic identity information.

The privacy language in the PASS ID Act is a welcome change to REAL ID’s gross error on that score. At least there’s privacy language! But creating a national identity system that is privacy protective is like trying to make water that isn’t wet.

Limits on Use of Card Data?

CDT’s final defense of PASS ID is the presence of meager limits on how data collected from national ID cards will be used. Much like with mission creep, the statutory language is beside the point, but CDT points out that PASS ID “prohibits states from including the cardholder’s social security number in the MRZ and places limits on the storage, use, and re-disclosure of that information.”

“MRZ” stands for “machine-readable zone.” In the PASS Act and REAL ID Act, this is referred to as “machine-readable technology,” and in the REAL ID rulemaking, the DHS selected a 2D barcode standard for the back of REAL ID licenses and IDs. Think of government officials scanning your license the way grocery clerks scan your toilet paper and canned peaches.

It’s true that the PASS ID Act bars states from including the Social Security number in that easily scanable data, but it doesn’t prohibit anything else from being scanned - including race, which was included in DHS’ standard for REAL ID.

And don’t think that limits on the storage, use, and re-disclosure of card information would have any teeth. It would create a new crime: scanning licenses, reselling or trading information from them, or tracking holders of them “without lawful authority,” but it’s not clear what “without lawful authority” means. It would probably allow people to give implied permission for all this data-collection and -sharing by handing their cards to someone else. It would certainly allow governments to authorize themselves to collect and trade data from cards en masse.

Not that we should want this “protection.” The last thing we need is another obtusely defined federal crime. Nearly as bad as being required to carry a national ID is making it illegal for people to collect information from it when you want them to!

And in Some Ways PASS ID is Worse

But let’s talk some more about that machine-readable zone. When Congress passed REAL ID, suspicion was strong that the “MRZ” would be an RFID chip - a tiny computer chip that can be read remotely by radio.

Recognizing the insecurity of such devices - and the strong public opposition to it - DHS declined to adopt RFID for the REAL ID Act. It did, however, work with a few states and the U.S. State Department to develop an RFID-chipped license that it calls the “enhanced driver’s license.” This has a long read-range chip that will signal its presence to readers as much as fifteen or twenty feet away. The convenience gain DHS and State sought for themselves at the border would be a privacy loss, as scanning cards could become commonplace in doorways and other bottlenecks throughout the country - your whereabouts recorded regularly, as a matter of course, by public and private entities.

Why do we care about “enhanced drivers licenses”? Because the PASS ID Act would ratify them for use as national IDs. States could push their residents into using these chipped cards if they didn’t want to implement every last detail of PASS ID.

Needless to say, ID cards with long-distance (including surreptitious) tracking are a step backward for privacy. This is one sense in which PASS ID is worse than REAL ID.

Consider more carefully also what PASS ID and REAL ID are about in terms of biometrics. Both require states to “[s]ubject each person applying for a driver’s license or identification card to mandatory facial image capture.”

States across the country are using driver license photos to implement facial-recognition software that will ultimately be able to track people directly - nevermind whether you have an RFID-chipped license or show your card to a government official. They are aiming at preventing identity fraud, of course, but with advancing technology, before too long you will be subject to biometric tracking simply because you posed for an unsmiling digital photo at the DMV. REAL ID and PASS ID are part and parcel of promoting that.

Does PASS ID address “most of the major privacy and security concerns with REAL ID”? Not even close. PASS ID is a national ID, with all the privacy consequences that go with that.

Changing the name of REAL ID to something else is not an alternative to scrapping it. Scrapping REAL ID is something Senator Akaka (D-HI) proposed in the last Congress. Fixing REAL ID is an impossibility, and PASS ID does not do that.

The UK has been operating in parallel to the United States on the national ID question, and rumors about the collapse of the UK national ID have been circulating for a couple of years.

Now comes word that Home Secretary Alan Johnson will scrap the national ID card system, making it voluntary. When volunteers fail to materialize, it is easy to anticipate that it will disappear entirely.

This is another thing U.S. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano might want to note as she struggles with with national ID issue here.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been all over the map on national ID issues. As governor of Arizona, she signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bush DHS to implement “enhanced driver’s licenses” in her state. These are licenses with long-range RFID chips built into them. But then she turned around and signed legislation barring implementation of the REAL ID Act in Arizona.

In some respects, PASS ID is worse than REAL ID. It would give congressional approval to the “enhanced driver’s license” program – invented by DHS and State Department bureaucrats to do long-range (and potentially surreptitious) identification of people holding this type of card. Back home, the Arizona legislature has just passed a bill to prohibit the state from implementing EDLs.

So the former governor of Arizona, who has both supported and rejected national ID programs, now supports a bill to approve the national ID program her home state rejects. Napolitano seems to be taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace.

With the move in the Senate to revive our moribund national ID law, the REAL ID Act, under the name “PASS ID,” it’s important to look at whether we’re still dealing with a national ID law. My assessment is that we are.

First, PASS ID is modeled directly on REAL ID. The structure and major provisions of the two bills are the same. Just like REAL ID, PASS ID sets national standards for identity cards and drivers’ licenses, withholding federal recognition if they are not met.

There is no precise definition of a national identification card or system, of course, but its elements are relatively easy to identify.

First, it is national. That is, it is intended to be used throughout the country, and to be nationally uniform in its key elements. REAL ID and PASS ID have the exact same purpose - to create a nationally uniform identity system.

Second, its possession or use is either practically or legally required. A card or system that is one of many options for proving identity or other information is not a national ID if people can decline to use it and still easily access goods, services, or infrastructure. But if law or regulation make it very difficult to avoid carrying or using a card, this presses it into the national ID category.

Neither REAL ID nor PASS ID directly mandate carrying a card. Doing so would be too obviously a national ID system, and politically unpalatable. But both seek to take advantage of the state driver licensing system, and they do that for a reason: Carrying a driver’s license is a practical requirement in most parts of the country, where the automobile reigns supreme as the mode of travel.

But maybe states would decline to participate. Nothing in the PASS ID Act directly requires states to implement the system, and they are entirely free to issue non-compliant licenses and ID cards. But this was also true of REAL ID - because of the constitutional rule that the federal government cannot commandeer the organs of state government. (The case is New York v. United States.)

What both REAL ID and PASS ID do is make it difficult for state residents to function without their nationally standardized ID. They both require the nationally standardized ID to enter federal facilities (perhaps fewer of them under PASS ID), to access nuclear power plants, and to board aircraft.

But the PASS ID bill has specific language saying that a person can’t be denied boarding because they don’t have a national ID. Isn’t that an improvement? It sounds like it, but that language simply restates the rules that exist under REAL ID.

The TSA has never been able to deny people boarding because they don’t have an ID. (Many people have traveled without ID to prove the point.)

What the Department of Homeland Security does is make it really inconvenient to travel without showing ID. Not having your national ID can put you into a long secondary-search delay. And a year ago, the Transportation Security Administration created a new rule allowing them to turn travelers away if they “willingly” refuse to show ID and don’t “assist transportation security officers in ascertaining their identity.”

What this means is that people not showing ID have to answer questions about themselves for a TSA background check - a background check that has included political party affiliation. In other words, you either participate in the national ID system run by states, or you participate in the cardless national ID system that the TSA runs. (The TSA was storing information about who traveled without ID until it got caught.)

The rules are no different between REAL ID and the REAL ID revival bill, PASS ID. You don’t have to carry a national ID to get through the airport, but woe to the person who tries to exercise that freedom.

In addition, the plan under PASS ID is for the federal government to pay states a lot more money for implementation. Cost concerns were a real impediment to REAL ID, and the (false) promise of federal funds is designed to draw states into issuing nationally standard IDs for all their residents.

On balance, REAL ID and PASS ID are peas in a pod. They are both aimed at being practically required. The plan under both is for everyone who has a driver’s license to have a nationally standardized, REAL-ID-type license.

The final “element” of a national ID is that it is used for identification. A national ID card or system shows that a physical person identified previously to a government is the one presenting him- or herself on later occasions. (A Social Security Number is a national identifier, but it is not a national identifiction system because there is no biometric tie between the number and a person.)

REAL ID and PASS ID both subject every applicant for a license to “mandatory facial image capture.” They both put a “digital photograph of the person” on the card. They are most definitely about identification.

Are we still talking about a national ID? REAL ID and the REAL ID revival bill, “PASS ID,” are structured the same. They have no differences in terms of their aim - to create a national ID.

It’s certainly unusual that members of the Senate who formerly appeared to oppose a national ID would reverse course. I’ll spend more time on the politics, of course, and delve into many other issues in future posts.

Though it’s not yet available, word has it that a bill to revive the REAL ID Act has been introduced in the Senate.

Its sponsors are an unlikely group: Senators Akaka (D-HI), Tester (D-MT), Baucus (D-MT), Carper (D-CT), Leahy (D-VT), and Voinovich (R-OH). REAL ID was dead in the water, but with a name change and a few burrs taken off, these five senators may just give it life once again.

Watch this space for posts as I analyze the bill and the politics. I’ll examine closely the substance of the “PASS ID Act.” I’ll try to figure out how both Senators from Montana - a state that rejected REAL ID flat out - became leaders in the fight to revive it.

More on the politics: As the stars lined up for repealing REAL ID outright, the Senate negotiated a compromise … with nobody. And I’ll look at something everyone is studiously ignoring - whether a national ID (by any name!) would actually do any good for the country!

L-1 Identity Solutions is a leading biometric technology company, and with its acquisition of Digimarc ID Systems it has become the nation’s number one manufacturer of state identity cards and drivers’ licenses. Such a company would benefit massively from implementation of the REAL ID Act, the nation’s moribund national ID law.

But REAL ID is in trouble. No state was in compliance by the May 2008 deadline, and the Department of Homeland Security had to give deadline extensions even to states that flatly refused to participate in the national ID scheme.

So what does the primary beneficiary of the failing REAL ID Act do? Change the name. On a recent earnings call, L-1’s Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Robert V. LaPenta, was a little too transparent in expressing his optimism about the government ID card buisiness:

We’re well-positioned in all of these opportunities and we’re seeing increased sell prices for those states that are incorporating and I won’t call it real ID, I’ll call it enhanced or higher security drivers license.

So it is with the “PASS Act,” a bill that would revive REAL ID under a different name.

Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI), formerly an opponent of having a national ID, has been working with the National Governors Association to round down the sharpest corners of REAL ID and give the national ID law a new name.

A news report says the new bill “explicitly prevents the creation of a national identification card.” It might also prevent things that walk like ducks, quack like ducks, and swim like ducks from being called “ducks.”

The only way to resolve the problems with REAL ID is to repeal REAL ID. Reviving the national ID program under another name is not a solution.